Experiments can blow up…

Anybody who has taken the time to read a few of my stories knows that I don’t work by a set formula. I’m always experimenting with different narratives styles, with different kinds of stories, and with variations on the standard story formula of “introduction, conflict, resolution.” I sometimes use outlines, and sometimes I don’t. I like writing about all kinds of characters, and I don’t have a standard type of character that I rely on to carry the stories. I don’t even have a set genre that I prefer to stick with.

I don’t have to write for money, and this is a luxury which allows me to write stories for myself, and for the artistic merit of creating something new and (hopefully) exciting. But sometimes, an idea just doesn’t work for me, even if the initial premise sounded good.

An example of this is an idea I had a few months back for a story about a straight guy trying to fake being bisexual to get into a breeding program in a post-global-flood Orgeon. This sounded funny when I first came up with it, but ultimately, I gave up and moved on.

Tonight, while talking to hubby, I noticed a pattern in my premise pitches. Almost all of them start out with me saying, “You know what would be funny?” Then I deliver a one line joke. I start to elaborate on that joke, and an outline builds in my head. By the time I’m ready to write, I’ve dropped the idea that I want to be funny, and I just aim to tell the story as it plays out.

I’m now two thirds of the way through a story experiment, Zombie Punter. It started off based on the idea that two friends who grew up planning for a zombie invasion finally have a chance to test out all of their theories when a zombie outbreak occurs. I thought the premise was about two guys killing zombies in humorous ways. But as usual, within a few paragraphs, I knew that wasn’t the case at all.

This is one of the experiments that hasn’t blown up in my face. It’s bold, and very different from anything I’ve done before. It features a first person, past tense perspective, where I typically do third person, past tense for the narration.

The main character is a gay male, and yeah, there’s some gay sex in the story. Will it turn some people off of my writing? Yeah, probably. But I didn’t write this for them, and I don’t write for the money. I write to enjoy the act of creation. I write to celebrate the joy of experimentation.

If, at some point, paychecks and fame come as a result of my writing, I will certainly not complain. But until then, I’m having a blast just mixing different word potions to see what happens. The worst that can happen is that I end up with a storyso bad that I cringe when I read it. And when that happens, don’t worry, I won’t torture you with it. I’ll just save it on my hard drive, for the days when my ego swells and I think “is there nothing I can do wrong?”

Then I read some of my crappier ideas and remember, yes, sometimes experiments can blow up.

Later…

Oh, poop!

Remember when I said this blog was going to be 5% whining? Consider this a whining post. Today was supposed to be a nice day of fun and relaxation at Cartoomics, a very nice comic book convention here in Milan that’s going on this weekend. I’d planned to take a bunch of pictures to make up a slideshow in Photobucket, but that plan didn’t turn out so well.

If you don’t care about health update posts, you can skip this one. I’ll put up a page cut to spare you the details.

Infinitely Stupid 2.0, Episode 3: Teh Horror

Just shut up and die quietly…

I’ve read some zombie novels, and I’ve watched a few movies. In most cases, zombies=end of the world. Sure, there are parodies where  this isn’t the case, like Shaun of the Dead. But for the most part, if you’re a character in a zombie flick, you’ve only got one fate: you’re lunch.

And yet, week in and week out, “clever” bloggers all over the world continue to make lists on how to survive a zombie invasion. This article is specifically for those guys. The rest of you can tag along, provided that you understand the truth. You’re dead meat too, so keep that self-righteous snickering to a minimum, m’kay?

Way, way too much information about getting fucked…

Today, I’m in the mood to reminisce and wax philosophical. I’ve got two stories I want to share, separated by almost fifteen years from each other, and I think these will explain a lot about me as a person. Maybe too much, so consider yourself warned; that page cut is there to protect the innocent.

The first story starts when I was 14, and I was living in Devine, in the two-story house that would later become Wendy Stoffel’s home for The Lesser of Two Evils.

I was actually a more prolific criminal than Wendy, but on that day, I wasn’t aware of the fact that I was committing a foul deed. I walked out of the backyard, through the latched gate, and across the street to the Super S grocery store that was behind our house. I was going for a soda, but I’d just barely crossed the street when this guy grabbed my arm and started yelling at me about jaywalking.

Now, according to this red-faced blowhard, what I should have done was leave via the front door, and walk a full two blocks from my house, where the nearest stop sign was. (note: not the nearest intersection, which was right next to my house…no that’s too fucking easy.) Then, I could cross the street and walk back. To anyone who knows me for more than a week and listens to me talk, it shouldn’t be surprising that, even at 14, my answer was, “Get fucked.”

Blood Relations PDF downloads take off! 0.o

Below the cut, you can find a pair of images captured from my browser. They’ve been cropped to hide my private information, but the images require some explanation. Normally, my statistics for file requests are dominated by the interface requests. However, the file request always reflect the number of new visitors I get to the site, not the number of actual visitors. This is because my site passes the graphics to the browser cache in a pre-load. All told, the entire interface is roughly 120 KB, so it’s not really that big. But by having your browser pre-load the buttons, your browser stops making the request to my server. So, even though I get anywhere from 14-22 unique IP visits per day this week, I only get 30-40 requests for button interface images.

Clear as mud now? Okay, look at the pictures…

Sheep! Not For the Vampire!

A bit of an explanation:  A while back I wrote a parody story based solely off the title of someone else’s story, Weep Not for The Vampire, by William, A. Veselik. The title itself became a running gag, and a fellow by the name of Alkilyu made up a fake book cover with the title Sheep! Not for the Vampire! I chose to write the story to fit the cover, and for a while this was a “super secret” Easter egg on my web site.

___

Oriel Stroker hunched in the shadow of the oak tree, sulking as he watched the bloated sheep grazing in the pasture below his vantage point. For years, he had ventured out to the hilltop to stare longingly at the succulent fat beasties, each one seeming to call out to Oriel, “Please, come and suck me like a fluffer in a Long Dong Silver movie.”

The writer’s laboratory…

The struggle starts every day with a new blank page. In the light spectrum, white indicates the presence of all color, and it is chaos. It is random, empty void, without life or substance. White is the color of death, the color of stagnation.

Black is the absence of light, but it is solid and real. It stands in stark contrast to the empty chaos of the white page. The color black is land, and it is water. It is order, providing meaning in a world that has none.

Black is the tool I craft worlds with, and white is the screaming void, appalled that I might sully its unending perfection.

Every blank page is a new laboratory, and every writer is God in their laboratory. Not a just, merciful god, one who offers no struggles to their followers. No, writers are cruel deities who decree that people must suffer in order to grow. Writers insist upon placing hidden meaning behind every tragedy, every disaster.

Every day, I’m presented with a new blank page, and another chance to breathe life into characters who couldn’t exist without my help. Every day, I take black “ink” and apply it to the white pages, building worlds, birthing people, shaping lives.

It’s empowering, and it fills me with a joy that simply cannot be put into words. In this act of creation, the writer’s laboratory of the blank page is never dull. This is what separates writers from other people. Where others see only a blank page, a writer sees a cosmos of inifinite possiblities.

Podcast casting…

Well, as some of you may know, I started doing live readings of my books in Second Life last year, and I started recording  a podcast of the first book. This was starting to have a positive effect on my sales, since usually, I managed to sell some of my books at every other live reading, and my traffic was starting to rise on my podcast page.

But there was a hidden cost to my readings, and I’m still paying it. My vocal cords are messed up. I can’t talk in a consistent voice range anymore, and my voice bounces all over the place. It’s really frustrating, and it annoys the piss out of me when I’m working on my video skits.

But, with the videos, I’m not needing to make a dozen different character voices for twenty minutes. With the stories, I do, and I can’t anymore. All the voices get mixed up, and I can’t stay in range to read more than one or two lines at time.

What I’d like to do is find someone to take over reading the podcast for me. If I could find someone willing to commit to a certain amount of readings per month, then I’m sure we could come up with some kind of monetary compensation. It wouldn’t be much, since the reader would only be doing a half an hour per week, tops. I’ll still be handling putting together the show and uploading it to the server, so once the reader records the show, they can sit back and  roll in the phat loot.

Additionally, whoever gets the spot hosting the show would be free to promote their own stuff, or stuff for their friends. At the beginning and end of the reading, they could spend a few minutes on that, and so it’s a chance for free ads. It offers the host another avenue of exposure for their own work, and they can make a few bucks a month as well.

So, please help spread the word around, or write to me to talk over more specific details about the job. Hopefully, I can find a reader to get the podcast episodes back on track in the next two months.

Win Skullvines titles for a year!

Yep, Skullvines has got a contest going on, and the prize is looking pretty sweet since I’ve been updated on what will be coming out this year.

Full details here: http://jerrodbalzer.wordpress.com/2009/03/22/win-skullvines-titles-for-a-year/

I conveniently already have a copy of Paul Kane’s Red coming in the mail, so I’ll be posting up a review to get a chance at this prize. I was in line already for Karen Koehler’s awesome new trilogy, Black Jack Derringer, as well as Tabloid Terrors III, which will feature a personal favorite theme of mine. (can’t say what yet.)

So, if you want to get your hands on some sweet loot, now is the time to act! Hurrry!

Later…